Friday, June 19, 2009

"Oh, Look, Honey!"

One day when I was young and broke and (inter alia) attending Army Reserve meetings, I stumbled on a happy surprise: my quarterly paycheck for my Reserve service, uncashed and unremembered among the socks and tieclips (sic) in my dresser drawer.

My first thought was--well hey, I can't be that bad off, if money can slip through my fingers like this. The amount in question was, I think $18.

So I can feel for Capricia Penavic Marshall, designated chief of protocol in the Obama administration, whose Federal income tax returns apparently wound up in the dead-letter office. The reason you can assume that she is not (despite appearances?) a tax cheat is that when matters got sorted out, it appeared that she was owed a refund of $37,259--pretty big compared to my Army pay but still a shade under the per capita annual income of the average American ($38,615). Apparently she hadn't noticed. Who knows what she might find if she checks he dresser drawer?

Afterthought: Maybe Capricia and I can get together for drinks and chuckles with banker Ron Peller, the investment banker who realized an employee might be stealing from him when he noticed that his bank account was "one or two million light." But we should let Peller to pay.